When Don Walther took the helm of
the Heico legal department as the
company’s first General Counsel in 2011,
he discovered that there were literally
hundreds of law firms billing the
company. His mandate, handed down
from the CEO, was to build a scalable,
sustainable legal group – not for a $2.5
billion company, as it was then, but for
the $10 billion company it will someday
be. After what Walther describes as
“100 percent turnover,” he now has an
internal team of five.

His first hire, legal operations manager Star
Levandowski, now a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,
was tasked with development of the project
that would ultimately help Walther effect that
transformation. Their results include reduced
legal costs, decreased variation in case duration,
and improved legal outcomes.

Once an infrastructure of policies andprocedures was in place, the legal team beganthinking about systematic changes. Leveragingthe Serengeti software platform, they begananalyzing the effectiveness and efficiency oftheir outside counsel. They generated data onwhich firms were billing Heico the most andwhat their hourly rates were. They developedoperational definitions for “value-added” and“non-value-added” work; for example:

OVERPRODUCTION:

• More than a necessary number of attorneys
working on a particular task

• Time spent on activities outside of the scope
of the original assignment

• Time spent crafting unnecessary work
product

CORRECTION:

• Re-work

MOTION:

• Effort spent to get organized

• Time spent getting up to speed on new/
transferred matters

• “Review” of email communications

OVER PROCESSING:

• Over-editing

WAITING:

• Passive travel time

UNDERUTILIZATION OF PEOPLE

• Assigning senior counsel to projects that
junior team members can address (with
the same or better efficiency) at lower
billing rates